Flirt by Tracy Brown

lie about his job calling him, when it was really his mother? His mother . . . Chloe had never heard him mention his mother before. She tried to recall if Trey had ever talked at length about his family. She couldn’t think of one instance when he had divulged much about his family, his friends, or anything personal. Chloe realized for the first time that she had been so caught up in what a great listener Trey was that she never noticed how little he spoke about himself. She decided to ask him about the phone calls from “Mom” when he got back in the car.
    Meanwhile, Trey finished paying the Arab guy behind the counter for his gas and a bottle of water. But he was preoccupied as he did so, thinking about the phone calls he’d been ignoring for days now. Why couldn’t everyone just leave him the fuck alone?
    As he stepped out and headed toward the pump where his car was parked, Trey yawned. He was exhausted after spending yet another late night sitting up, watching videotapes. As he stepped off the curb, a Nissan came to a screeching halt just inches from hitting him. His heart racing, he realized how close the woman had come to running him down. Scowling at the driver, he took a deep breath and told himself not to overreact. She hadn’t hit him, so no harm, no foul.
    The woman behind the wheel couldn’t believe this idiot had the nerve to give her a dirty look. She stuck her middle finger up at him and yelled out her open window, “Move out of the fucking way before you get yourself killed!”
    Trey erupted in rage. “You stupid bitch! You should watch where the fuck you’re going!” He charged over and kicked her car, then reached through the open window as if to grab the horrified woman. The entire time, he cursed her out viciously. The gas station attendant came running over and pulled Trey away from the driver, who had shrunk to the passenger side of her own car to get away from the raving black man.
    The attendant tried to calm Trey. “Calm down! It’s okay.”
    Trey was pumped and ready for battle. His chest was heaving and his muscles bulged. “That crazy bitch almost ran me down!”
    “I saw it, my friend. I saw the whole thing! She was wrong. Just go. It is not worth it!”
    The woman sped off, checking her rearview to make sure that crazy nigga wasn’t following her. Trey stood in her wake, furious, his chest heaving. He walked over to his car and pumped his gas as Chloe sat petrified in the passenger seat. Once he’d pumped his gas, Trey climbed back into the car and started it.
    Chloe looked over at him. He was sweating, and the vein was throbbing in his temple again. She could tell he was pissed off. “What happened?” she asked, now too distracted to even question him about the mysterious calls.
    Trey didn’t answer her. Instead, he shook his head, turned up the music, and peeled out of there.
     
    Chloe sat in her anthropology class and text-messaged Jason for the hundredth time. She hadn’t seen him in weeks, and hewasn’t returning any of her phone calls. She didn’t want to just pop up over his house, because their relationship wasn’t like that. It wasn’t like he was her man or anything. Still, Jason had never ignored her phone calls, text messages, and voice mails until now. She wondered what had made him switch up so suddenly. Then she shrugged it off.
Fuck him,
she thought. At least she still had Trey to keep her occupied.
    Weeks had passed since the incident at the gas station, and Trey had done everything he could to show Chloe he wasn’t a ticking time bomb waiting to explode. He hated the fact that she had seen him lose his cool, and he assured her that the behavior she’d witnessed wasn’t typical of him. Chloe told him that she understood, that everyone gets angry sometimes. But just to be on the safe side, Trey lavished her with more gifts and more attention than ever before. And Chloe was loving every minute of it.
    One day, as Trey drove her to the library, he